The hardware and software behind a studio run without a desk. In the usesthis.com tradition. The organizing rule is simple: everything has to be operable from a phone, so the list skews toward things that survive that constraint.
Phone-first hardware
- iPhone and iPad — the entire studio runs from these two. No laptop is in the loop.
- An Apple Silicon Mac — always on in another room, lid shut. It does every build, test, deployment, and AI run; I never sit at it.
- Starlink — keeps the whole thing reachable from places a desk would never go.
Remote control
- Blink Shell — SSH and mosh from the iPhone and iPad. This is where most “real computer” work actually happens.
- Screens — screen sharing into that machine, reserved for the rare emergency that cannot be done over a shell.
- Telegram — not a chat app here so much as the studio’s control surface. Each project is a thread; agents reply with diffs, links, and build artifacts.
- Element X — Matrix client for the messaging I want to keep off the big platforms.
AI and development
- Claude Code — the core of how I build, in the terminal and through the agent stack.- Hermes — Nous Research’s self-hosted agent framework, now running the studio’s background agents.
- Fastlane — every TestFlight upload and macOS notarization, driven headless.
- Wispr Flow — voice-to-text for dictating most of what I send into a thread.
Writing and knowledge
- Obsidian — a synced markdown vault (I call it Cobalt) that holds notes, daily journals, and shared agent state. Runs as a headless sync daemon on that machine.
Web and infrastructure
- Hugo — the static-site generator behind synodic.co and kj6.dev. Fast builds, nothing to keep running.
- Cloudflare — Pages hosts the sites, Workers and Pages run the small services (like Patchbay Go), and the DNS lives here too.
Away from the desk
- onX Backcountry — maps and routing for getting properly out of cell range.
- Cervélo Aspéro — the gravel bike, for long days and bikepacking.
- Specialized Epic — the mountain bike for everything else.
Not using
As deliberate as the list above. What I have stepped away from says as much about how I work as what I keep.
- Facebook and Instagram — off them on purpose. The attention cost never paid for itself.
- Strava — I track rides for myself, not for an audience or a leaderboard.